Nick Saban defines Mental Toughness in a whole new way

During Spring training head football coach Nick Saban shared with his players the definition of mental toughness in a way I’ve never heard it before.

His epiphany of what it means to be mentally tough came from his experience weather proofing his Florida home last year during hurricane season.

During the installation of his hurricane proof windows, he asked the installer, “how do you figure out that those windows are better than these windows?”

The installers replied we measure the toughness of the window by “the breaking point each window has.”

It was right then that Nick Saban understood mental toughness to be a measure of how easily something is broken.

It was right then that Nick Saban understood mental toughness to be a measure of how easily something is broken.

He asked his players…

“What does it take to break you in any circumstance?”

“Whats your breaking point?”

Ultimately he finished by saying that mental toughness provides the discipline to sustain over time. “We must impose our will on the competition,” he says. “What we do is important, but how we do what we do becomes even more important. He follows that with “our goal is to have a team that nobody wants to play.”

My guess is he will use his new definition of mental toughness as the means to the end.